The event has been marked by a Pontifical Mass in the usus antiquior celebrated by Msgr. Mvé Engone, at which the bishop of Port-Gentil, Mathieu Madega, as well as ministers of the Gabonese government assisted.

On Friday morning they gathered on a scruffy beach in Libreville, sang and laid flowers in the water for their compatriots who had died in 1993, shortly after taking off from the Gabonese capital for a World Cup qualifier in Senegal.

In several rounds of anonymous voting, both Jean Ping, a former Gabonese foreign minister who has led the commission since 2008, and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma , South Africa's home affairs minister and former wife of President Jacob Zuma, failed to win two-thirds majority support from members of the 54-member organization.

The five defendants in the case, owners and executives of small military-equipment companies, were among 22 people charged in 2009 in connection with a purported scheme to pay a $1.5 million bribe to the Gabonese defense minister in return for what undercover investigators said was a $15 million contract to outfit his country's national guard.

The defendants had been led to believe that they could participate in the contract if they agreed to inflate their prices on invoices to the Gabonese government, masking a $3 million "commission," according to evidence presented at trial.